Evidence for an Israelite Exodus (?)

Faith & Science Conversation
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The pottery in the hill country became simpler. The style didn’t spread west. There are no breaks in the ceramic records at many of the sites in the holy land between the bronze and iron ages.

What archaeologists are we talking about here, and where do they report their findings? I’d like to read about this.

Now concerning the conquest of Canaan, I’m wondering where the Israelites got their swords and learned how to use them. It would be pretty easy to slaughter Canaanite babies, children, women, elderly and crippled civilians with sticks and rocks or even bare hands, but if they were faced with resistance from male Canaanite fighters they might have a problem.

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It required evidence to overturn anything like this.

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@ivar @Alice_Linsley

Further down, I show the blog that @Alice_Linsley has written.

Would the blog be more similar to Peter Feinman’s view? A Hyksos Levite-Led Exodus in the Time of Ramesses: compared to the others in this list?

  • Early Date: The Exodus Took Place in the Fifteenth Century BC (Scott Stripling)

  • Late Date: A Historical Exodus in the Thirteenth Century BC (James K. Hoffmeier)

  • A Hyksos Levite Led Exodus in the Time of Ramesses II (Peter Feinman)

  • Alternative Late Date: The Exodus Took Place in the Twelfth Century BC (Gary A. Rendsburg)

  • The Exodus as Cultural Memory: A Transformation of Historical Events (Ronald Hendel)

Blog from @Alice_Linsley
Thursday, February 9, 2023
The Exodus Narrative from a Different Angle

Alice C. Linsley

Analysis of the kinship pattern of Moses’ family reveals that Moses was Horite Hebrew. The Horites and the Sethites constituted the Hebrew ruler-priest caste. The Hebrew married only within their caste (endogamy) which explains why so many of the people in the Hebrew Scriptures are related by marriage or have common ancestry.

The oldest known site of Horite Hebrew worship is Nekhen on the Nile (4200 BC). This settlement predates the building of the Great Pyramids at Giza and the step pyramid of King Djoser (Third Dynasty). The oldest known tomb, with painted mural on its plaster walls, is located in Nekhen and dates to c. 3500–3200 BC.

The Horite mounds and the Sethite mounds were sacred Hebrew settlements along the Nile. Though separate groups or moieties, they shared common religious practices and beliefs, and they worshiped the same God and served the same king.

It is clear in the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (2400-2000 BC) that the Horites and the Sethites maintained separate settlements. Utterance 308 addresses them as separate entities: “Hail to you, Horus in the Horite Mounds! Hail to you, Horus in the Sethite Mounds!”

PT Utterance 470 contrasts the Horite mounds with the mounds of Seth, designating the Horite Mounds “the High Mounds.”

This diagram shows the relationship between Moses and Seir, the Horite Hebrew ruler mentioned in Genesis 36.

Moses was a sent-away son

As the son of Amram’s cousin bride, Moses was not Amram’s proper heir. Analysis of the social structure of the early Hebrew suggests that Moses was sent to live for a time with his maternal uncle Jethro in Midian (avuncular residence). That is the same pattern exhibited by Jacob who was sent away to live for a time with his maternal uncle Laban. In both cases, these sent-away sons struck out to establish territories of their own. That is one way to think of the “Exodus”, except Moses didn’t live to rule over a territory of his own.

Keep in mind also, that the biblical narrative of the Exodus is the story of only one Hebrew clan, the clan of Jacob who was called Israel. There were many other Hebrew clans and some of them were living in Canaan. The Hebrew had dispersed widely before the time of Abraham. They had already settled in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and other regions of the Ancient Near East.

Exodus 17:12 describes an event that connects Moses to an earlier Horite ruler. “But Moses’ hands grew weary, so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side. So his hands were steady until the going down of the sun”.

King Hor (c. 1800 B.C.)

About 300 years before the time of Moses, there was a Horite king whose statue shows him with up-raised arms over his head. From predynastic times, this ka/kah (K3) symbol indicated divine authority, potency, and the sustaining power of the Spirit.

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Just a note that when you quote you should use the quote mark function to show what is quoted.

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Well, how I feel about this doesn’t really matter haha. The Israelites also had certain laws about eating that made it impossible for them to share a table with gentiles. Acts 10 explains how God helped Jewish Christians realise that from then on they could (and should!) eat together with gentile Christians.

I don’t know enough about the topic to answer that question, sorry.

Probably they were disliked because of a combination of several issues: religious, ethnic, cultural.

Interesting article, thanks!

I don’t find this blog post convincing. It is better to stick to the Biblical text. Moses wasn’t sent away, he was placed in his little ark on the Nile to prevent him being killed by the Egyptians. And Amram couldn’t be married to Ishar, because Ishar was a male (Exodus 6:18).

@riversea : besides using the blockquote button, please try to not copy the whole article in your post. If you give the link, we can read it for ourselves.

Those very long posts make this forum thread hard to read. :sweat_smile:
Thank you!

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Exodus 6:18
The sons of Kohath were Amram, Izhar, Hebron and Uzziel. Kohath lived 133 years.

Izhar Ishar, different spelling.

Amram wanted to marry his brother Ishar or Izhar Exodus 6:18 shows Ishar as Izhar.

How come Amram (Moses’s father) married his aunt?

◄ Exodus 6:20 ►
And Amram took him Jochebed his father’s sister to wife; and she bare him Aaron and Moses: and the years of the life of Amram were an hundred and thirty and seven years.

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No, Amram didn’t want to marry his brother. The author of the article claims that Izhar was a woman and that she bore Amram Korah. Which doesn’t make sense.

The law of Moses prohibits a man marrying his aunt (Lev 18:12-13). But before the law was given at Sinai, people did such things.

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@ivar Now I see the mistake.

So @Alice_Linsley thought Izhar, or spelled Ishar, was a woman, and mistaken this. Because Izhar, or spelled Ishar, was male.

The picture shows
Male Ishar Brother = Male Amram Brother = Female Jochebed Aunt. It appears that male Amram married his brother Ishar as well as female aunt Jochebed.

Now I see why this is confusing. Because Ishar was not a woman.

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oh come on Bill read the following and tell me the authors of these statements DO NOT BELIEVE they are of a a real event (I’m just focusing on the flood for brevity but i could also include texts about sodom and Gomorah).

Take particular notice of Genesis 11:10 and also 9:1 highlighted below.

The really significant thing is that in Genesis 9, Moses is recording what God said directly to Noah. Many here will scoff and say how would Moses know what God told Noah other than by oral tradition? Welt, aside from the obvious oral tradition, we know God also spoke face to face with Moses (the bible records that in a number of places) so we can be very confident that those are Gods words, not man’s interpretation. Acovenant is a pretty significant legal agreement…the following prove quite comprehensively even on the balance of biblical evidential probabilities that this passage of scripture is directly opposed to any claim that the flood is not literal and global. The other issue is that Christ is recorded as also believing it during His ministry by eyewitnesses to his testimony via Matthew, Luke, and Peter (not to mention the apostle Paul as well)

Genesis 11:10 This is the account of Shem’s family line. Two years after the flood, when Shem was 100 years old, he became the father of Arphaxad

Genesis 7:17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth.

Genesis 9:I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.

2 Peter 2:5 if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people… but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others

Matthew 24:37 As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. 39And they were oblivious, until the flood came and swept them all away.

Luke 17 People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.

The fact is the ONLY reason you do no agree here is because Evolution says you cannot…period! So you refuse to accept normal comprehension of language, and when that doesnt work, the bible writer must be illiterate, confused, got his facts wrong, or made a scribal error! The problem here is we have multiple writers all reporting the exact same event using literary techniques that are still used to day to describe real events.

BTW a little trivia…note that in the book of Revelation, the final chapter in the earth is its destruction and cleansing by fire and brimstone! Its interesting because the flood did not wipe out the evidences of sin prior to the event. these are still buried within the earth.I find it interesting that almost all of those resources that we extract from the depths of this earth clearly buried by sedimentary deposition (which i believe the bible says was a global flood), are harmful to both us and in particular, the environment. God knows this i think because he tells us that at the end of time, all evidences of sin and its consequences will be completely removed from existence by fire and brimstone!

I think the above cleansing by fire and brimstone is quite significant given that science tells us that there is no evidence Sodom and Gomorah ever existed (that this account is a fairytale). How does the bible say those cities were destroyed? Wasnt it fire and brimstone?? Food for thought

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Look back a few verses to Genesis 9:2 “The fear of you and the terror of you will be on every animal of the earth and on every bird of the sky; on everything that crawls on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea.” Does every animal fear humans? Pretty sure if you went face to face with a lion, or tiger, or bear, Oh my, they would rip your face off. This is theology and not history, or God got the history wrong.

Sorry no.

Never said that so please stop putting words in other people’s mouth.

Well you are wrong about that. Like so many other things.

Boy have you got this wrong.

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In context, “the earth” means “the known world”. The only other option is that it meant the flat earth-disk under the solid sky-dome.
You don’t get to stuff modern science into ancient literature if you want to understand that ancient literature.

And the reason I disagree is that you are abusing the text that the Holy Spirit inspired. The Noah story tells of a flood that wiped out the known world, and none of the other verses you quote change that.

Incorrect: both cities have been found listed as existing on tax rolls uncovered by archaeologists, and archaeology counts as a science.

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This seems a strange objection to me - There are four independent records of the resurrection (based on the fact of their internal differences of the passion/resurrection accounts in each) recorded, this is more than we get of many if not most events from antiquity that we consider historical. This is multiple independent attestation already.

And not being in official Jewish records is also a strange objection… Given the politics of the Sanhedrin and their antagonism to Christ and any claim of his resurrection… including that the historical record we do have affirms that they went out of their way to pay money to cover up the event, would one really think they would have happily allowed their few believing members to affirm Christ’s resurrection in their official minutes?

Perhaps this would be an interesting critique if we had other writings confirmed from Nicodemus and Joseph which failed to mention the resurrection, but to my knowledge we have no extant writing or records from either Nicodemus or Joseph, no? (Not to mention, from what we have even of the biblical record, there is nothing that affirms or suggests that they were witnesses of the resurrection… they witnessed the crucifixion and burial to be sure, but nothing that I can find says that they witnessed the resurrection or even became believers or Christians afterwards.)

And why not an official record from Roman sources? Again, according to what historical record we do have, the few Roman eyewitnesses of the resurrection were paid well to cover up their knowledge of said event… and so far as we read they didn’t actually witness Jesus resurrected.

Further, given the historical records we do have, do we have any reason whatsoever to think that anyone “from another nation” witnessed said resurrection? I’m not aware that there are any claims that any such person existed. The record we do have affirms that Jesus bodily resurrection, while obviously convincing to those he showed himself to, was nonetheless kept relatively quiet and only revealed to his own followers. He came to his gathered disciples and showed them his resurrected body… Not like he is recorded to have shown up at the palace and showed his nail-scarred hands to Pilate and his entire consort… if there were biblical records of him having done so, then I would think it an interesting critique that these records were missing from official Roman records.

And while one could dispute Paul as being an eyewitness to the immediate events on the day of the resurrection, he gave extra-gospel second-hand testimony of various events around the resurrection that had been relayed to him, of appearances to James, and to Peter, and to the 500 or so, besides his own first-hand witness of his experience with the resurrected Jesus… the fact of it being canonical does not keep it from being “outside of the gospels” eyewitness testimony from antiquity.

This may not be enough to convince a hardened skeptic, but I hardly think this would qualify as “scant evidence” unless one is blinded by a naturalistic or anti-supernaturalist presupposition?

If Jesus indeed rose from the dead and showed himself exclusively to his disciples yet with many convincing proofs that he was alive, then what we have recorded in the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles is pretty much just what one might expect to find extant.

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There seems to be a reasonably strong church tradition (at least in some groups) of Nicodemus and Joseph continuing secretly in the church, but I haven’t heard where it comes from beyond credible speculation.

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Both general climate change and specific local activity have made Israel and its region more of a desert over time. The natural shifting from glacial to interglacial, and the human-caused warming beyond that normal cycle, promote warmer and drier conditions. Also, deforestation promotes hotter, drier conditions - besides the shade, trees are taking lots of water out of the ground and releasing it into the air in evapotranspiration. Besides the general activity of the inhabitants over time using up wood, I have also seen the assertion that at one point the Ottomans got the bright idea of taxing land based on how many trees you have.

Once again, of course Noah’s flood was a real event. But the global flood of modern young-earth claims was not a real event.

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Reading about reforestation projects is a bit of a hobby, along with other land-restoration efforts. I recall one place where it hadn’t rained since before WWII, and that after the war no one lived there and so a few trees sprouted. Noticing this, some organization decided to acquire the land and re-forest it, which took several years. One of the big events once the forest got established was that clouds were observed forming over the low mountains just beyond the forest, and after a few years over which such clouds became common there was rain in the mountains, which after another few years led to seasonal streams. The last I knew about it was a dozen years ago, and they were installing substantial boulder checks in the seasonal streambeds and those had resulted in perched water tables that fed the streams and had them running six weeks longer than before, with a resulting increase in natural ground cover both in and around the forest.
It never ceases to amaze me how much water plants can pump into the air – in this case, enough to restore an ancient water cycle.

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Brilliant, kind of like how the British decided to reduce the number of cobras by paying a bounty on them. While the number of cobras out and around decreased, the number being brought in for the bounty kept growing – enterprising Indians had decided that home-grown cobras made for more dependable bounty payments!
So the British ended the bounty program, and (predictably) the people turned loose the ones they were raising.

Similar to this is one I studied in an ecology course: to control some invasive plant, authorities found a small insect that ate the seeds before they fully developed. That was fairly effective, but those insects also loved a native species of plant and were reducing its numbers far more rapidly than they were hitting the invader. So they found another insect that preyed on the first insect . . . and a beetle that preyed on the second insect, which ended up solving the problem because the native bats found those beetles to be delicious and so slaughtered them during beetle mating flights.

Anyway . . .

Off-Topic2

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Fluctuations between hotter, drier vs. wet conditions have played a major role in the Near East and North Africa. The narratives in the Torah are linked to the fluctuations in the climate because dry periods lead to famine and redistribution of people. The reason why Israelites ended up in Egypt was a famine caused by a dry period. Joseph became a ruler because God showed him how the wet and dry years would follow each others. Also in the other books of the OT, rains was an important topic. Following the covenant between God and Israelites should have given rains when needed, disobedience would lead to a lack of rain.

It is interesting to speculate how a wider coverage of forests in the area could have affected the history of Israelites. Patchy or sparse forest is not sufficient to maintain forest-driven water cycles. Maybe agriculture and deserts were reasons why it was not possible to have continuous forest in the area, which might also explain why the biblical scriptures do not give guidelines about the need to preserve forests.

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Humans are clever to find ways to cheat. A century(+) ago, there was a bounty program to get rid of birds of prey in this country. Hunters needed to bring the feet of the birds as an evidence of a kill.
People soon realized that all authorities were not experts in species identification. An expert went through a large sample of bird feet from the bounty program and concluded that the most common bird of prey among the catch was chicken…

I bought an identification book of vertebrate species from that time period. In the book, the identification of birds was mainly based on the morphological details of the feet. Apparently there was a need for such knowledge, during a period when the identification of unknown birds started by first shooting the birds.

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Joshua 17:14-18 is an interesting passage:

14 The people of Joseph said to Joshua, “Why have you given us only one allotment and one portion for an inheritance? We are a numerous people, and the Lord has blessed us abundantly.” 15 “If you are so numerous,” Joshua answered, “and if the hill country of Ephraim is too small for you, go up into the forest and clear land for yourselves there in the land of the Perizzites and Rephaites.” 16 The people of Joseph replied, “The hill country is not enough for us, and all the Canaanites who live in the plain have chariots fitted with iron, both those in Beth Shan and its settlements and those in the Valley of Jezreel.” 17 But Joshua said to the tribes of Joseph—to Ephraim and Manasseh—“You are numerous and very powerful. You will have not only one allotment 18 but the forested hill country as well. Clear it, and its farthest limits will be yours; though the Canaanites have chariots fitted with iron and though they are strong, you can drive them out.”

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Conversely, there are passages forbidding wanton destruction of trees in warfare, and the ritual for purification from an unsolved murder assumes that a natural (not agriculturally altered) site is available.

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